Ken Hall Reports: When political principles are primarily personal

When Rob Portman, the Republican senator from Ohio, announced last week that he was changing his position on same-sex marriage because he had learned that his son is gay, the reaction was predictable.

Ken Hall

When Rob Portman, the Republican senator from Ohio, announced last week that he was changing his position on same-sex marriage because he had learned that his son is gay, the reaction was predictable.

Proponents of gay rights welcomed his support even though many said they wished he had done it earlier. His Republican colleagues in the Senate said that he was welcome to his opinion but that they would not be changing theirs.

He is far from the first conservative Republican to come out in public to support gay rights.

Many in the libertarian wing of the party see no reason why the government should be involved in this or many other personal decisions. It's not as much about more rights as it is about less government.

Dick Cheney, the most outspoken icon still defending the Bush administration, has long been open to the idea of gay marriage. His daughter has been in a relationship with another woman for more than two decades and the two were married in Washington, D.C., last June.

The race to represent New York's 18th Congressional District featured nasty exchanges on all of the topics that would be expected when an openly gay Clinton liberal, Sean Patrick Maloney, took on a tea party Republican, Nan Hayworth.

All of the topics except one, that is. As The Wall Street Journal reported last summer, Hayworth has a gay son and was one of three Republicans in the congressional LGBT Equality Caucus. The issue never came up in all of their clashes.

As the nation moves inevitably toward this latest expansion of equality — don't take my word for it; check the polls — the thing to watch for will be not whether a politician favors gay rights, including marriage, but whether that position is principled or personal.

And that got me thinking about another significant change, one reflected best by folk singer Phil Ochs in his 1966 song "Love Me, I'm a Liberal." First, a bit of pop culture political history. Back then, conservatives disagreed with liberals but for true ridicule, the kind that stings, you had to take several steps to the left where the more radical thinkers and performers of the day were having fun.

As Ochs said in introducing the song:

"In every American community there are varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects, ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally." Or, as others put it, a conservative is a liberal who got mugged.

Now, we seem to be seeing the same phenomenon on the right. Members of Congress and potential presidential candidates do all they can to appeal to the hard core base of the party unless they happen to have a gay child.

If they can learn this lesson about principles from personal experience, maybe there's hope for them to learn some others as well.